Very often we write down a sentence too early, then another too late; what we have to do is write it down at the proper time, otherwise it's lost.

Only when I am by seawater can I truly breathe, to say nothing of my ability to think.

Our greatest pleasure, surely, is in fragments, just as we derive the most pleasure from life if we regard it as a fragment, whereas the whole and the complete and the perfect are basically abhorrent.

What can you do. You get a name, you're called 'Thomas Bernhard', and it stays that way for the rest of your life. And if at some point you go for a walk in the woods, and someone takes a photo of you, then for the next eighty years you're always walking in the woods. There's nothing you can do about it.

...He was just scraps of words and dislocated phrases.

The anger and the brutality against everything can readily from one hour to the next be transformed into its opposite.

I did not want to be anything, and naturally I did not want to turn myself into a mere profession: all I ever wanted was to be myself.